First, baby Sims will no longer grow into toddlers — they’ll instead jump straight to childhood. Even more distressing, the game will no longer have pools.

The removal of pools may seem like a random, minor alteration, but they’ve played an important, dark role in past Sims games.Once you get sick of a Sim, the easiest, most diabolical way to get rid of them is to put them in the pool, remove all the ladders and steps and fill their Sim lungs with Sim water.

Hardcore Sims fans (a thing that still exists apparently) are understandably upset. In the case of pools in particular, it seems like EA and Maxis are intentionally cutting a feature to stem the tide of Sim euthanasia, but they claim that’s simply not the case…

“Rather than include toddlers, we chose to go deeper on the features that make Sims come alive: meaningful and often amusing emotions; more believable motion and interactions; more tools in Create A Sim, and more realistic (and sometimes weird!) Sim behavior. Instead of pools, we chose to develop key new features in Build Mode: direct manipulation, building a house room-by-room and being able to exchange your custom rooms easily, to make the immediate environment even more relatable and interactive for your Sim.”

So, in other words, “We don’t have a reason for cutting these features that you’re likely to find satisfactory, but there’s going to be other cool stuff in the game, so don’t be mad!” Haven’t heard a video game industry “explanation” that lame since, well, when was the last time Ubisoft said something?